I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.

a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.

I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.